This Is Not a Mixtape

Last December, Brooklyn's Oneida issued a limited-run cassette, Fine European Food and Wine, on Scotch Tapes. Sure, the tape contained years-old live improvisations the band deemed unfit for "mainstream" treatment. But Oneida aren't unheralded kids laboring in their bedrooms. Over the past decade, they've put out 10 albums on Jagjaguwar, including 2009 triple LP Rated O. "Why release a cassette?" their singing drummer, Kid Millions, muses. "Man, who knows, right?"

Oneida are only one of the most recent indie-inclined outfits embracing the tape format. London label the Tapeworm opened its virtual doors last summer, selling out a limited run of cassettes by enigmatic multimedia artist Philip Jeck. Upstart bands Jail and Harlem each put out tapes on Fullerton, Calif.-based Burger Records; Sub Pop went on to sign Jail, now Jaill, while Matador inked a multi-album deal with Harlem. Hometapes, the Portland-based label behind art-rockers like Bear in Heaven and Pattern Is Movement, capped the year by mailing out a label sampler to journalists-- on cassette.

Perhaps more surprisingly, a few of underground music's heavier hitters are also championing the medium. "I only listen to cassettes," Sonic Youth's Thurston Moore told CBC radio last summer. Dirty Projectors released last year's highly anticipated Bitte Orca on CD, vinyl, mp3-- and cassette. Deerhunter have made two EPs available on tape: 2008's super-limited On Platts Eyott and 2009's aptly titled Rainwater Cassette Exchange. Beck told Pitchfork last summer he was recording a cassette-only cover of Moore & co.'s classic EVOL album for an upcoming Sonic Youth box set (a spokesperson contacted for confirmation did not immediately respond to e-mail).

Tapes never fell completely out of favor among experimental and noise musicians, but their broader underground resurgence appears to reflect a confluence of cultural trends. Instant access to almost any recording has left some of us over-stimulated, endlessly consuming without really digesting what we hear. Many children of the 1980s first owned their music on cassette, so for them the format represents a nostalgia for simpler times; younger kids probably never owned cassettes in the first place, so for them tapes don't have any negative associations. The spread of Internet-enabled smart phones and 24/7 social networking has made work and pleasure increasingly intertwined in our digital existences. Like records, cassettes offer listeners a tangible experience at a time when our jobs, our social lives, and our popular culture are becoming more and more ephemeral.

In a January blog post for London's Guardian, music critic Simon Reynolds rightly linked cassettes' netroots resurgence to the 2000s' decade-long 80s obsession. Not only were tapes the way many young people first owned music in the Reagan era; from post-punk to C86 to riot grrrl to industrial and noise, cassettes also embodied the 80s underground's do-it-yourself ethic. So much so, in fact, that many indie labels never stopped creating them. Lowell, Mass.-based noise label RRRecords has kept cassette culture alive into the new millennium, joined by Wolf Eyes' likeminded American Tapes and Heavy Tapes labels. In the early to mid-00s, lo-fi garage/psych duo Sic Alps' Folding Cassettes, Woodsist parent Fuck It Tapes, and L.A.-based Not Not Fun-- along with lo-fi maestro Ariel Pink-- helped chart cassettes' course back from pure outsider art to a skewed kind of pop. Last August, Rhizome writer Ceci Moss identified 101 cassette labels.

Cassettes outsold vinyl and compact disc, respectively, from the early 80s until the early 90s. And yet despite their recent resurgence in certain indie circles, 2009 was the worst year for cassette sales since Nielsen SoundScan started keeping numbers, in 1991, according to the record-industry sales data provider. There were a staggering 8.6 million cassettes sold in 2004, and cassettes were still selling 1 million-plus copies as recently as 2006. But by last year-- vinyl's best year in the SoundScan era-- cassette sales had plunged to a pathetic 34,000. Of the 2,000 tapes sold year-to-date, most have been albums at least 36 months old, bought at indie retailers in the south Atlantic region, in the suburbs, according to SoundScan. Last year's best-selling cassette: Jagged Era, the 1997 debut album by Atlanta R&B group Jagged Edge. Now you know.

Paradoxically, it may have taken the technology of the 00s for the technology of the 80s to really make a comeback. Today's cassette culture is both a reaction to and a product of digital media, the Internet, and downloading, says Shawn Reed, who runs Iowa City-based cassette label Night People. On one hand, tapes are "the embrace of something old and outdated, intentionally obscure and marginal, almost pointless in some way," he acknowledges. On the other hand, the Internet is a place where cassettes are "allowed to flourish," Reed says-- the web helps niche products reach a wider audience. Matthew Sage of Patient Sounds says the Fort Collins, Colo.-based cassette label's tapes would be "collecting dust in our living room" without the work of blogs, crediting Jheri Evans' Get Off the Coast in particular. "Blogs cater to audiences with really specific tastes, and with their help, they can make an item that seems benign or totally outdated a 'must-have,' which is kind of a double-edged sword," Sage observes.

One sound that helped was chillwave aka glo-fi aka hypnagogic pop. Washed Out and Toro Y Moi each released cassettes on Charleston, S.C.-based Mirror Universe, Neon Indian played warped tape like an instrument on debut full-length Psychic Chasms, and Memory Tapes-- well, just look at the name. Artists on New Jersey indie Underwater Peoples, such as Julian Lynch or Real Estate-related project Ducktails, were putting out cassettes for tiny labels like Arbor. Built on the haze of nostalgia, boosted by the feeling that the whole thing is an organic underground movement, and trading in lo-fi production, chillwave is perfect for the boombox or old auto cassette deck.

Artists choose to put out their music on tapes for reasons both aesthetic and practical. From a practical standpoint, cassettes are arguably the least expensive physical recording format available. Burning CD-Rs one-by-one might be cheaper, but once you get into buying large-scale duplicators, there's not much comparison. All told, a cassette costs $0.20 apiece to manufacture, says Sic Alps singer/guitarist Mike Donovan, whose Folding Cassettes is set to release a Greatest Hits double album this year on Yik Yak. "$1,500 to release a CD or LP of music that was bound to sell 50 or 100 copies of the minimum 500 run caused me to release a bunch of limited lathe cuts, but then ultimately I switched over to cassettes exclusively," he explains. It doesn't hurt, either, that tapes can be made quickly, with no minimum order. Sean Bohrman, who runs Burger Records with Lee Rickard, points out one other important practical consideration. "We put out CDs on our label, too," he says. "Nobody buys them."

Cassette label operators definitely aren't oblivious to the collectability of limited edition tapes, but these are people with day jobs and/or classes. When it comes to manufacturing and distribution, they have to get creative, and they have to do most of the work themselves or with friends. "It's basically a lemonade stand," Ben Ellenburg says of Mirror Universe, the label he runs with Ryan Moran, where cassettes are dubbed straight from his laptop.

Pretty much all these labels stuff their tapes by hand. Some, like Scotch Tapes, occasionally recycle old cassettes. Many order their tapes from Brooklyn-based National Recording Supplies, which will cut tapes to any length-- perfect for shorter releases. "We source our tapes from a very small company located in the north of England," says John Arthur Webb of UK indie Paradise Vendors. "I think they used to make most of their money from making Biblical tapes. All their stock is very old now. It's so cheap to buy, but all the colors are faded. If you order a bunch of 'red' colored tapes, you won't get red tapes-- they'll be a sun-faded orangey pink color. They have a disclaimer on their website about it. It's great."